TOPICS: A HISTORY OF COMEDY IN THE UNITED STATES in Fall 2025 (FM2091A)

This course investigates comedy in American film and media from the first half of the 20th century. Examples of early cinema, slapstick comedy, and musicals will help to examine the roles of gag, performance, character, and narrative in short and feature films from the silent and sound eras. How do visual and verbal humor take part in these films’ formal construction? How were they produced, distributed, and exhibited to audiences? What were their contexts of reception? What are the different ways of writing their history? Through an approach informed by media archaeology and sound studies, cinema will be situated within a broader network of media industries including the vaudeville stage, phonograph records, radio, and television. Humor’s role in negotiating cultural, social, and political shifts in American society, its potential for both resistance and oppression, will be another guiding question. While this course’s focus is on historical practices in the United States, students will have the opportunity to give presentations that apply the analytical frameworks developed in class to examples of comedy and humor in other national and geographic contexts, as well as in contemporary film, television, and social media.